MR. OR MS. CFO: YOU'RE ON!

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.

In today's media environment, besides your business' performance, there's a lot riding on your performance -- preparing for and executing communications strategies to promote and protect your corporate image.

We're a long way from the 16th century, where people could go entire lifetimes and get about as much information as could now be printed in one daily Wall Street Journal. Fast forward to the 21st century where a 24/7, digitally connected world broadcasts information and entertainment content at an ever-accelerating pace.

"Multi-media dissemination of information now plays a major role in the life of every person and every business, with the business media the hottest-growing segment," says Gustav Carlson, a Greenwich, Conn.-based consultant specializing in corporate communications.

Dealing with the business media is the responsibility of every senior executive, to ensure that messages about your organization are conveyed in the form and format that you desire. It starts with asking: "Who/what are we as a company?" "How are we viewed externally?" "How do we want to be viewed?" With answers to these questions, you then go about developing your plan.

A major part of any firm's overall corporate communications plan is a keen recognition of the value and power of its corporate image -- its brand equity -- and then committing the resources, both people and financial, for taking charge of promoting and protecting that image.

Besides the CEO, it's now the CFO and often, other senior financial executives, who are expected to be company spokespersons for the business media -- which includes newspapers, magazines, television, radio, online and wire services.

The financial and business media has changed enormously over the last 5 to 10 years, from a news source that few paid attention to -- except for checking stock quotes -- to around-the-clock international reporting. Much of the growth stems from what Carlson dubs "the rise of the consumer investor." A former journalist, public relations executive and author of Total Exposure: Controlling Your Company's Image in the Glare of the Business Media Explosion, he sees the explosion in the business news media being driven by a growing hunger for business and financial information. That has escalated as more people take responsibility for their own investments and retirement portfolios -- managing 401(k)s -- and the recent popularity of the dot-com era.

Like a double-edged sword, there are at least two...